Cafe Royal party is over as 143 years of high society goes under the hammer

Dining out at the Cafe Royal in 1953. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty Images

They were taking down the Christmas decorations at the Cafe Royal in Regent Street, central London, yesterday and putting up the auctioneers' equivalent of For Sale signs, prior to selling off all the mementoes, souvenirs, chandeliers and knick-knacks of the 143-year-old London institution early in the new year.

Everything must go on 20 January - from the framed prints of the stars and celebrities who patronised the cafe in its heyday to the blood-spattered boxing ring in which every notable British boxer of the last 50 years has fought in contests organised by the National Sporting Club, from Henry Cooper to Frank Bruno - a snip at an estimated £6,000.

Bonhams admits to being perplexed at how to price some of the items, but there will be no reserves. What value do you place on the silver-plate carving trolley, only slightly battered, that weaved its way between the tables for the best part of a century? Or what is the worth of the elaborate corking and labelling contraptions, looking like Edwardian rowing machines, that used to seal up the cafe's wines when they were decanted from casks into bottles? What price, for that matter, the large barrels themselves, labelled Gin, Armagnac and Sherry?

Yesterday potential bidders wandered through the deserted ballrooms and suites with names such as Napoleon, Dubarry and Dauphin, inspecting the lots. The Cafe Royal had a desolate and deserted air, the parties that once caroused and echoed around its stairwell long since gone and the velvet curtains - estimates up to £600 - and clear glass, eight light chandeliers dusty and bleak in the daylight, were all docketed with lot numbers.

Charlie Thomas, Bonhams' furniture and works of art sales director - more used to valuing the contents of country homes - said: "Everything will make what it makes. It all has to go. These are really unusual things which you wouldn't find anywhere else. We have had a lot of interest. I suppose people will be bidding for romantic objects, unique items and there will be a fun factor."

The closure of the Cafe Royal - opened in 1863 by the French refugee Daniel Nicols who arrived in London with £5 after fleeing his creditors in Paris - signifies the real end of an era, as well as an institution.

Virtually everyone in London society has passed through its doors: Oscar Wilde hallucinated on absinthe in the grill room - he apparently mistook a waiter stacking chairs for a man picking tulips - and had his only civil meeting with his nemesis the Marquis of Queensberry, before launching his disastrous libel action.

Shaw and Kipling, Yeats, Sickert and Whistler were patrons, as well as Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana and Gordon Ramsay, who had his wedding reception there. When the future kings Edward VIII and George VI lunched as princes, the waiters' instruction book noted: "Always plain food. No fuss."

The framed photographs between the mirrors on the fading walls of the grand staircase - estimate £100 each - are redolent of an atmosphere of brandy fumes and cigar smoke at the end of long and convivial lunches: there's Denis Compton being fed a slice of cake by actor Frances Day and Laurence Olivier looking pensive beside Ivor Novello, who was clowning with Coral Browne.

Stacked against a wall yesterday, a portrait of the Victorian star Lillie Langtry rubbed metaphorical shoulders with Aneurin Bevan. The sporting prints of 19th century bare-knuckle fights and the signed photographs of long-forgotten Australian touring teams will go too: the cafe used to be an early port-of-call for visiting cricketers.

In place of the cafe, a new five-star hotel is planned in time for the London Olympics, though the state rooms themselves, which are grade 1 listed, will remain. The sell-off is being organised on behalf of the current managers, the Starwood Hotel Group, and the site has been leased by the crown estate to the Israel-based Alvov Group property company for 125 years at a reported £90m.

It will be too late for this Christmas, but for those seeking the really unusual present, how about the electroplated 19th century duck press, apparently used in those civilised far-off times to squeeze the juice out of small carcasses, perhaps for Wilde himself? That is not something you see every day and the auctioneers reckon it might fetch £200.

A haunt of daring

In the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Cafe Royal. There, on that October evening - there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amid all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath and, "This indeed," said I to myself, "is life!" Collected Works of Max Beerbohm